What a real SEO checker should cover in 2026
For about a decade the standard free SEO checker checked the same dozen items: title, meta description, H1, canonical, robots, sitemap, alt text, broken links, page speed. They were useful when Google's ten blue links were the only surface that mattered.
That surface is no longer the only one. Roughly 30% of US informational queries now return an AI Overview above the blue links [3]. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity together serve hundreds of millions of weekly users who never see your Google ranking. A 2026 SEO checker has to grade both surfaces.
The 45 checks we run
The audit runs in eight dimensions. We crawl up to 50 pages, then grade each dimension with sourced rules.
Foundational (7 checks)
- Title quality and length.
- Meta description quality and length.
- Canonical tag presence and correctness.
- robots.txt presence, syntax, and crawler allowlist.
- sitemap.xml presence and validity.
- Indexability of primary pages.
- Default Lovable / template title detection (you would be surprised).
Technical (8 checks)
- HTTPS and HSTS.
- Redirect hygiene and status codes.
- Viewport meta and responsive rendering.
- Core Web Vitals [4]: LCP, INP, CLS.
- Render-blocking resources.
- Image optimization (modern formats, lazy loading, dimensions).
- Broken internal and outbound links.
- hreflang correctness on multilingual sites.
On-page and content (7 checks)
- H1 uniqueness and heading hierarchy.
- Semantic HTML usage (header, nav, main, article, footer).
- Content depth (words per page, thin-content detection).
- Intent match between title, H1 and body.
- Internal linking depth.
- Duplicate or near-duplicate titles.
- Freshness signals (visible dates, last-updated).
AI Overviews / AIO (6 checks)
- llms.txt presence and quality.
- Answer-first opening of the first 200 words.
- Question-shaped H2s that match user query embeddings.
- Factual density and citation-style writing.
- Chunkability for passage extraction.
- TL;DR blocks above the 800-pixel fold.
Generative Engine Optimization / GEO (5 checks)
- Entity clarity (named products, people, technologies, locations).
- Schema depth (Article, Organization, Person, FAQ where relevant).
- Wikidata and sameAs edges from Organization and Person schema [5].
- Author bios with credentials.
- Citation density in long-form content.
Local SEO (5 checks)
- NAP (name, address, phone) consistency.
- LocalBusiness schema.
- Geo markup (geo coordinates, areaServed).
- Locations page presence.
- Opening hours and contact methods.
E-E-A-T and authority (6 checks)
- Person schema for authors with credentials and sameAs.
- About, Contact, Privacy and Terms presence.
- External citations to authoritative sources.
- Visible expertise signals (credentials, dates, references).
- Security headers (CSP, HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options).
- Brand presence and mention frequency on-page.
Action planning (1 deliverable)
A 30/60/90 plan with owners, an effort/impact matrix, an executive brief, and engineer-ready tickets.
How we compare to Seobility, Ahrefs and Semrush
Honestly: Seobility, Ahrefs and Semrush are excellent at classic technical SEO. Seobility's free URL audit was a genuinely great product when it shipped. Ahrefs has the best backlink index in the industry. Semrush has the deepest competitive-keyword tooling. None of them grade you for the AI-search surface.
If you only need a 2015-style audit, any of them will do. If you need to know whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can read and cite you, run our audit alongside theirs.
What you get
- A graded report across all eight dimensions, scored 0-100.
- An executive brief written for non-technical stakeholders.
- An engineer-ready ticket list with the exact files and lines to change.
- A 30/60/90 plan with owners and effort estimates.
- The raw evidence for every finding: HTTP headers, JSON-LD, content excerpts, offending URLs.
- A shareable public URL if you want it; private if you do not.
How long it takes
Sixty to ninety seconds. No signup. Leave an email and we will notify you when it is ready, or watch it stream live.